JAKUB JULIAN ZIÓŁKOWSKI
NASELLINI
Opening: Opening June 1st – 7pm
From 1 June to 1 October 2017, the project room of the MAN Museum will host Nasellini, the first solo exhibition of the Polish artist Jakub Julian Ziolkowski in an Italian museum, curated by Lorenzo Giusti with the assistance of Rowena Chiu.
Ziolkowski is known for his surreal paintings inhabited by fantastic and often disquieting creatures. His is a “pictorial organicism” nourished by heterogeneous references to a mixture of Western and Eastern traditions that converse with the history of the artistic avant-gardes. The emerging iconographies narrate states of mind, chaotic worlds in which reality and imagination become confused, and project the viewer into a universe of dreams, recollections, and desires. In appearance dominated by chaos, Ziolkowski’s works in reality contain an inner order governed by currents of interwoven narrative.
The third in a yearlong series at the MAN devoted to a diffuse investigation of the actuality of painting, the exhibition revolves around “a peculiar kind of pasta, the “Nasellini”, an imaginary dish inspired by the shape of the nasal cavity that evokes the legend of “tortellini”, which are said to originate from observation of the navel”.
With paintings, sculptures and a series of film clips produced during a period of residency in Sardinia, the artist will present a surreal advertising campaign promoting the sale of “Nasellini”. The project explores the dividing line between the real and the unreal, with a deconsecration – through irony, deconstruction and the expedient of play – of the collective memory connected with pasta, one of Italy’s signature elements.
The works will appear in a space modified for the project, with a site-specific installation that evokes the atmosphere of a traditional trattoria, replete with coloured walls on which painted posters are haphazardly displayed.
The video footage, all shot between Nuoro and Sardinia’s coasts using amateur actors, was made possible with a special grant from the Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission.
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (Zamość, Poland 1980), lives and works in Cracow. Among his recent solo exhibition: BWA Zamosc Gallery, ‘tbc’, Zamosc, Poland 2017; Fundacja Galerii Foksal, Glimpses, Warsaw, Poland 2017; Neues Museum, Das Leben Selbst, Nurnberg, Germany 2017; tbc, Sick Of Love, Café Nhà Sàn, Hanoi, Vietnam 2016; Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. Imagorea’, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Poland 2014; Raw Thoughts, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 2013; Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. Skin and Bread, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Worsaw, Poland 2012; Jakub Julian Ziolkowski: In Utero, Parasol Unit, London, UK 2011; Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. Timothy Galoty & The Dead Brains, Hauser & Wirth New York, USA 2010. Among the numerous group exhibition: An Uncanny Likeness, Simon Lee Gallery, New York, USA 2017; Animality, Marian Goodman Gallery, London, UK 2016; State of Life’, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China 2015; Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, 55 Venice Biennale, Venezia, Italy 2013; Painting Between the Lines, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, USA 2011; The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA 2009.